


simply wicked to a tee

by misandrywitch



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Ahhh. Well. You Know., Missing Scene, No Plot/Plotless, Post 3.9 pre 3.11, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 18:30:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8171615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: The way she feels about him, Lardo thinks, borders on the ridiculous.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [punkpadfoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkpadfoot/gifts).



> i started this while quite drunk at midnight or something last night & i'm finishing it very not-drunk this afternoon. it has no plot & is really quite pointless unless you consider lardo being schmoopy about being in love to be pointless, which i don't. it's been a while since i've written abt these two & i would just like to say that every person who has uselessly tossed around the world 'queerplatonic' in my direction owes me ten bucks. title's from 'i for u & u for me' by the decemberists ('a few missteps along the way but i'm really pretty happy to be here')
> 
> ahh. well. you know. i do know, shitty. i do know. 
> 
> for cait bc i love u & i'm gay. 
> 
> actualremus.tumblr.com

 

 

 

“Well,” Shitty says. He leans on the doorframe of Lardo’s bedroom with his bag and his jacket situated at his feet, his voice down. “That was some intense shit. With the pie. I’ve seen him pull them outta thin air but I’ve never seen him drop one.” 

“Yeah,” Lardo says. “You check on him?” It almost doesn’t bear asking because it’s Shitty, but she says it anyway because it feels necessary.

“I knocked,” Shitty says. He shrugs one shoulder. “He didn’t answer and a bro’s not gonna invade a bro’s privacy when he’s going through a bumpy one, yeah?” 

“Yeah,” Lardo’s sat herself on her desk chair and she swings it around so it’s facing backwards, tucks both knees under her. She’s got wool socks on but her feet are chilly anyway, and the Haus creaks and groans. Fall’s settled in, winter on its way. 

“I’ll call him in the morning,” Shitty says. Lardo amuses herself for half a second thinking about his to-do list:  _ Do dishes. Text Mom back. Give Jack play-by-play reactions to his highlights from the last game over the phone. Fling Blue Book Citation Guide at a wall. Smoke. Research Baker v. Carr (1962). Ignore father. Call Bitty and respectfully invade his privacy.  _ Law school’s granted him a tidier set of jackets and a whole new repertoire of curse words, but some things stay pretty similar and through her years at Samwell Lardo’s gotten pretty used to anchoring her normal around Shitty’s abnormal. Codependency or consistency- semantics. Feels like Shitty pulling faces at her from the minimized Skype window when they should both be doing homework. 

It also strikes her that it feels weird, it falling to Shitty. She is the one living across the hall, after all. 

“Hey,” Shitty says, like he’s reading her mind. “Lards. It’s okay. Yeah? He’s always played his cards pretty close to his chest like he’s out for a million fucking dollars and you’re holding all the chips.”

“Have you ever played poker before?” Lardo asks. Upstairs, she hears stomping feet and then the sound of Ransom and Holster’s bunkbed shifting against the floorboards as they climb into it. She and Shitty had loitered, cleaning up dropped pie, for a while until Nursey had begged off to go home, and Chowder had slammed the lid down on his Comp Sci homework. Bitty had never come back downstairs. And the two of them were just as good dragging this out in the door of Lardo’s bedroom as they were on the nasty green couch.  

“I have,” Shitty says. “Don’t be rude. Anyway, Lards, it’s good. You two kinda have that in common, you know.” He grins - a joke. 

“Is that what happens when you live here?” Lardo rolls her eyes. “You absorb everyone else’s traits?”

“I was positively solemn in my youth,” Shitty says, “until I lived with Holster. Keep a wary eye for any interest in showtunes. Or hockey, god forbid.” 

“Just Hilary Knight,” Lardo says. 

“She would be so lucky.” Shitty winks. 

Shitty’s an easy person to miss, Lardo thinks. It’s the natural habit of taking up space, something you notice when it’s gone. A reaction, and she knows this, to being told “seen and not heard” and “mind your tongue.” She understands the delight in saying exactly what you want, or not saying it at all. At first glance they probably seem like the antithesis of each other, but they’ve got more in common than most people might think. 

She’s always wanted to be like that - the kind of person who leaves a vacuum in a room when they leave it - and never quite pulled it off. But there’s something about understated that’s growing on her, conceptually, and the flipside of outgoing is annoying anyway. Vacuums do suck up a lot of air. 

They balance each other out. Lardo likes that idea more that she’d like to admit. 

It had taken her a while to detangle the idea that Shitty’d be an easy person to feel bereft of - a systematic daily presence making her laugh, making her roll her eyes, making her think about things, suddenly yanked away is going to leave a void of some kind - and the idea that she missed him because she missed him. By the time she had, it had almost been too late.

Almost. 

That counts for a lot.

“Well,” Lardo says. “I don’t see why you’re gonna call Bitty tomorrow when you could just talk to him.” 

“Well,” Shitty says, “because teleportation hasn’t been legalized in the US of A yet. Thanks Obama. And I really outta take off now if I want to sleep in my own bed and not on the train tonight. I’m getting elderly, Lards. My eyesight’s not what it’s used to be and I worry for my hairline.” 

“Shitty,” Lardo says, in a tone that she thinks is pretty reasonable considering the circumstances. “You’re the dumbest genius I’ve ever met in my life.” 

“Hey!” Shitty says. “Don’t be rude to Jack. Whatta you -- oh.” 

SInce the start, it’s felt like they’re running around the edges of a game neither of them is very good at yet, but they are enjoying some fantastic beginners’ luck. There’s something compelling in that, anyway.

“Yeah,” Lardo says. “ _ Oh. _ ”

“You make a compelling argument,” Shitty says. He takes a step into her bedroom and lets the door swing shut behind him as he does. “I am, however, interested in the precedent you used to develop this evidence.” 

“Weekend before last,” Lardo says, with what she hopes is the right amount of smugness.

“Well,” Shitty crosses his arms over his chest, which does interesting things to the line of his shoulders under his t-shirt. He’s been developing what Lardo suspects she’s going to refer to as the Lawyer Voice going forward, and he’s using it now. “I accept your application of the case  _ L. Duan v. B. Knight, Weekend Before Last, My Apartment  _ and move to uphold the precedent. All in favor say ‘aye.’”

“That,” Lardo says, “is not how a courtroom works. I’ve watched enough Judge Judy to know that.” 

“So I’m wiggling a few rules,” Shitty says.

“I am not going to say ‘aye,’” Lardo says. “I am going to take my shirt off.” 

Shitty runs across the room so fast he practically falls over, before Lardo even finished pulling her arm out of one sleeve of her hoodie. She hits him with it. 

“Hey,” Shitty, close enough to grab it, does so. He ties the end of it into a knot, then he spins her desk chair around so the back of it isn’t in their way. Lardo swivels so she can look down at him, sitting back on his heels. He puts his hands on her knees and looks up at her

“Hey,” Lardo says and, hands still caught awkwardly in her sweatshirt, she leans forward on her desk chair. Rather than kissing him, Lardo catches her fingers in his hair. 

She’d spent a long time rationalizing that this would be complicated, not worth it, too hard. She hasn’t been disproven, exactly, but what she does think she’s realizing is that the best things in life are complicated. Complex, surprising, maybe a bit ambiguous. 

The expression on his face is a puzzle, an exercise in vulnerability. When she met him, four years ago now, Lardo would never have suspected she’d have a laundry list of things she likes about him. But he’d surprised her. Of course he had. Some day she’ll get used to it. The fact that he carries his emotions right there on his face, sometimes unintentionally but almost always unguarded - that’s something she likes a lot. 

“What you thinking about?” Shitty asks, which indicates that there’s something visible on her face too. He’s always been good at reading her expressions, right from the get-go. It used to make her nervous - being seen, being known. It doesn’t anymore in quite the same way. 

“Just stuff,” she says. The way she feels about him, Lardo thinks, borders on the ridiculous. She has no idea how to say that out loud. “You?”

Shitty smiles sideways. “Just stuff,” he says, and he leans forward a little on his heels to meet her, presses his mouth to the underside of her jaw, then the spot right below her ear, the edge of her earlobe. 

There’s a point, maybe, where you’re supposed to get used to this. That’s what Lardo thinks as she meets Shitty’s mouth, fingers in the collar of his shirt and in his hair. The uninhibited sense of lightness - headrush, a shot of tequila, a view from somewhere very high up when the wind’s in your hair - somehow coupled with the real physicality of it. They tussle with Lardo’s sweatshirt, Shitty’s elbow in her stomach for half a second, and he smacks his knee on the side of the bed trying to walk backwards. His mustache tickles when he laughs against her collarbone. The space when they aren’t together feels like something literal and heavy, and when they are it should logically be the antithesis of that - formless and wild. Shitty's fingernails on the inside of her knee, her hands in his hair. Like an anchor for something. 

 

-

 

It doesn’t feel like keeping secrets, exactly, because they’re not keeping any from each other. Anything they decide not to tell is just nobody else’s business. Lardo likes the sense of private intimacy, something just for the two of them. A thread tying them together well-knotted in the middle and leading in the misty future, a pathway suggesting rather than promising the qualification of wants and dreams and desires. An image in the abstract, natural and undefined. Purple and green. 

 

-

 

“That is a metric shit fuck ton of water,” Shitty says. He’d gotten up, lazily and in no hurry, to pull a joint out of Lardo’s dresser drawer and he paused to peer out the window at the rain dumping in the yard. He pulls at the latch and swings it open a few inches, and the smell of water, fresh and dark, comes into the room. He pokes his head out, because of course he does, leaning his forearms on the window sill. “It’s a real downpour out there.” 

“You’re gonna freeze your nuts off,” Lardo knows that is a pointless argument because Shitty can - and has - tromped out in a snowstorm in a t-shirt. 

“There will be water if god wills it,” Shitty says. “Which apparently is the case. The yard’s gonna be a motherfucking swamp tomorrow.” 

Lardo stands up, dragging her duvet around her shoulders like a cape as she does. It drags across the floor under her feet as she crosses the room and she pulls it around Shitty’s middle as she puts her arm around his waist. 

“Lighter’s right over there,” she says. 

“Thanks, brah,” Shitty leans sideways to avoid stepping away from her, flicks the lighter until the flame catches then puts his arm around her shoulders. Lardo rests her head against his shoulder. Her toes are cold, and so are Shitty’s fingers when he hands her the joint. 

Outside the window the rain pours down in the past-midnight darkness, big heavy drops clinging to the glass and dropping on the window pane. Thunder rumbles somewhere far away and the rain on the roof, a floor above, sounds solid. 

“Yknow what I miss most about this place?” Shitty asks. “Other than the breakfast?” Lardo’s first guess would have been the breakfast so she doesn’t respond, just lets him keep going. “How loud it is. The way it sounds at night, yknow? There’s a certain way that it creaks when the wind’s coming in from the west, and the rain makes a certain noise, and it settles and stuff.”

“It kept me up,” Lardo says. “The first couple weeks. Wasn’t used to it.” As if on cue the Haus groans around them with the wind. Shitty grins, showing all his teeth. 

“I wasn’t either when I first moved in. But I got used to it. It’s nice. It’s like, ‘hey, bad weather out here.’ New apartments don’t sound like that.”

“I’ll record it,” Lardo says. “So you can listen to it on your phone.” 

“That’d be chill.” Romanticizing an old house’s leaks and creaks is something only Shitty would do - and Lardo knows a lot of art students - but there’s something about the genuineness in it that she likes anyway. Lardo doesn't know what things she'll miss most, yet. What she likes best right now - sure. Annie's coffee. Living across the hall from Bitty. Carrying a lot of keys on her keychain. Her grandmother peeling oranges with her brightly painted nails and putting the slices, fragrant and acidic, in a row on a plate for her. Deep dish pizza. Beanie weather. Shitty's ribs under her fingers. 

“You sure that’s what you miss most?” Lardo asks instead, poking at his ribs with her fingers. He glances down at her.

“Hey, I said about the Haus. You never lived here when I lived here.”

“No,” Lardo says. “You said about ‘this place.’ Very ambiguous, Mister Knight. Bad news.” She steps away from the window, dragging the blanket with her. 

“Okay,” Shitty says quickly. “Now I’m cold.” 

“Thought so,” Lardo says. She chucks the duvet back across her bed then slides under it. “Get over here.”

“Okay,” Shitty says, and he does.

 

-

 

"And to think," Shitty says in a low volume, or as quiet as his voice gets, as they creep down the dark early-morning hallway together. Lardo's socks slide over the floorboards a little, but the Haus is dark and quiet. Drying itself out. Lardo smiles at that. "I could've been staying up late all by myself working on this fucking report."

"Don't sound too smug," Lardo says. "I think that means you have to do it today." 

Shitty pulls a face, tongue out, and slings his bag over his shoulder. When he opens the window at the end of the hallway, water cascades down over his head and Lardo jumps back. Shitty just laughs, brushing his hair off. 

"Hey," Lardo says. "If you were gonna go home why did you have a chance of clothes in your bag, huh?" 

Shitty shoves at the window to get it to stay up, then turns to look at her. "I was a Boy Scout," he says. "For, like, five minutes. Dad thought it would build character." 

"Right," Lardo says. Shitty ducks his head to step out onto the roof. His sneakers slide a little on the wet tiles and he grabs at the siding to steady himself. "Don't die. Call me tonight." 

"No problemo," Shitty sits down on his butt and scoots out to the edge of roof to peer down. It isn't a far drop to the porch, and the best way to do it is to lower yourself until your feet touch the railing, but the water pooling in the gutters does complicate it. Rationally, Lardo knows he could probably just go out the front door and seeing his dangling skinny legs flailing around for the railing would be a lot more conspicuous than his walking down the stairs. But who is she to deny him the pleasure?

"Alrighty," Shitty, slightly apprehensive, says. "So I'll -- "

Lardo's phone buzzes as he begins to speak and she glances at it - Bitty. She's sure it's going to be a "Uh why are you on the roof at eight in the morning?" text but it's not.

"Wait," she says. "Bitty wants to know if you're still here and if we wanna meet him at Jerry's in an hour." 

"What kinda man would I be if I didn't make time for mimosas?" Shitty says. 

"An inadequate one." 

"You want an Annie's coffee? I'm already practically dangling out here and I don't think I'm coming back in that way."

"That's what she said," Lardo says.

"You're gross." 

"Your mom's gross. Extra vanilla." 

"Would I forget? Pshaw." Shitty inches forward on his butt again, then pauses and turns suddenly so he's on his knees, scrambling awkwardly up the roof tiles. He grabs at the window frame, catches Lardo's chin with his fingers.

The weight of Shitty's teeth behind his upper lip, against her mouth. Lardo adds that to her list of things she likes. 

She kisses back, breathless and content with it, until Shitty's knees slide out from under him suddenly and he slips down a few inches, grabbing at both the window and Lardo's shoulder as he does. 

"Get off the roof," she says. "Before you wake everybody up. Or bring it down with you." 

"Right," Shitty says, and he's not really a blusher but he does grin from ear to ear. "See you in an hour." 

Lardo waits until she sees his fingers vanish from the drainpipe and sees him sprint across the soggy lawn, kicking up water and knocked-down leaves as he goes - flailing limbs and brown jacket. Then she closes the window again and goes back into her room to take a shower. 


End file.
